Piaggio P.180 Avanti business turboprop - photo

[Altair]

Piaggio P.180 Avanti business turboprop.

Fullsize image: https://diqn32j8nouaz.cloudfront.net...t_fullsize.jpg



Previously:

1909 Curtiss Pusher - GIF
Kyushu J7W1 Shinden - photos
Business jet thrust reverser - GIF
Private jet belly landing - GIF
Gulfstream III Ebola plane - photos

[mklotz]

Reminds me a bit of this...

[metric_taper]

This was a very well implemented canard design aircraft. In comparison the Beechcraft model 2000 Starship was a dud, and extremely over complicated with a canard that required mechanical sweeping as the center of lift from Fowler flap deployment resulted in unstable flight conditions (and other stall issues). And hiring Burt Rutan an outsider didn't go well, with infighting of existing designers. Lot's of reasons for failure. Raytheon being one of them.
I worked for the company that provided the avionics for both of these aircraft.

[mwmkravchenko]

Reminds me a bit of this...

Sun fish version????

[steveofthenw]

And the loudest airplane ever put into production. One used to fly out of Hillsboro airport every now and then and you could hear that thing inside a house with death metal blasting.

[Duke_of_URL]

The Beech Starship is the loudest private aircraft I've ever heard. One would fly over my house in Wichita, KS and I called it the flying lawnmower for its sickening howl. It was a composite dog, a first of sorts, but way too heavy and Beech bought them all back, except for one, and that owner vowed to never sell it back. For a long time the Starship (aka "Scarship") production line was all represented along the runway from whence they were birthed waiting to be scrapped.

Piaggio actually learned a lot from the Beech Starship mistakes, and it turned into a pretty successful private aircraft.

[metric_taper]

The Beech Starship is the loudest private aircraft I've ever heard. One would fly over my house in Wichita, KS and I called it the flying lawnmower for its sickening howl. It was a composite dog, a first of sorts, but way too heavy and Beech bought them all back, except for one, and that owner vowed to never sell it back. For a long time the Starship (aka "Scarship") production line was all represented along the runway from whence they were birthed waiting to be scrapped.

Piaggio actually learned a lot from the Beech Starship mistakes, and it turned into a pretty successful private aircraft.

The prototype Beech made was a 3/5 version. This flew well, and was a nice scaled up version of his Long-EZ. When they made the full size airframe, many issues came up.
Beech did not want to do the iterative design needed to remove the excess composite weight, as Ratheon was only interested in certification.
The one good thing they were left with was the many autoclave ovens. They had to build 50 to get the Wichita tax abatement for building the new building for manufacture.
This is my memory of this. I worked on the autopilot that Collins Radio was contracted to produce along with all the displays. There were 17 or 19 CRTs, most of them color except a backup CDI in green phosphor. It was a major design effort by Collins to integrate many systems to reduce volume and weight. The displays all had integrated symbol generators, as previous version had that in a remote box, with RGB cabling up to the cockpit.

I recall several issues with the Starship besides being heavy and a fuel burner, you had to duck you head down walking down the main isle. And it was noisy inside the fuselage as well, as those pusher props resonated the airframe.
This airframe being 'plastic' cause new regulations for lighting and RF radio susceptibility requirements. That ended up keeping me employed for 29 years as I became an expert in protection circuit design for HIRF and lightning requirements.

[steveofthenw]

There was also a Starship at Hillsboro. I think it ended up being used at Portland Community College as a teaching tool.